The Readymade Thief

by Augustus Rose

  Lee treated the JDC as she did her first months at high school: she kept her head down, stayed out of the way, and observed. But unlike in high school, invisibility wasn’t possible here. Her attempts to remain unseen only made her a target. On Lee’s third day inside she was sitting at an unoccupied corner of a table, keeping her head bent close to her tray as she shoveled food into her mouth, when she felt a presence behind her. She tightened the grip on her fork but kept her head down. A girl came around to her side slowly and drifted into the seat across from Lee. Lee saw a pair of hands with skin so pale they were nearly translucent. Lee allowed herself to look up.

  The girl across from her had a matted bramble of short black hair over sharp cheeks and a wide mouth. She smiled thinly.

  Lee understood enough not to make eye contact with anyone inside, which could always be construed as an invitation or a threat, but she couldn’t help it now, and once she did, she couldn’t look away. Within the whites of the girl’s large eyes drifted electric-blue irises that were lumpy and misshapen. Twin cobalt jellies floating in bowls of milk.

  Lee and the girl stared at each other across the table, Lee getting lost in those eyes, the girl placid and unblinking. The other inmates were watching them. The girl reached out and took Lee’s hand. Her skin was dry but warm. She widened her smile and emitted a long, high-pitched whine from somewhere deep in her chest. Then a man who looked like some kind of doctor came and touched the girl’s shoulder, and she let go and allowed herself to be led off to another table, where she sat and waited for the man to bring her food.

  A girl at the end of the table scooted down across from Lee. “She say something to you?”

  Lee shrugged into her food.

  The girl was a chunky Latina with a name tattooed on her wrist in script too elaborate to make out. “Why aren’t you wearing no shoes?”

  Lee said nothing, didn’t even look up. The day before, a girl, with two other girls on lookout, had tripped Lee in the bathroom, sat backward on her chest, and taken her shoes, then left without a word. Lee had felt relief that that was all the girl did, but she knew that giving in so easily, without a fight, meant she now had a target on her back. Not only was she quiet; she was easy prey. None of the staff had even noticed she’d spent the day walking around in socks.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll hook you up.”

  Lee carved out a bite of tuna and cheese casserole, which had hardened into a solid block. She risked a look up. Not as far as the girl’s eyes but to her mouth. Her lower lip had been split at the middle and was scabbed over.

  “That girl? She from Wonderland.” She pronounced the word without “d’s.” When Lee didn’t respond, she added, “Three Block. She a Thrumm girl. They letting them dine with us now. It’s an experiment.”

  Lee learned later that Wonderland was what they called the JDC’s psych ward, which had been commissioned several years prior to contain what had become a rash of kids found drifting through the city, their eyes engorged and jellied, their agencies gone. Those whose parents could be found were sent home, but too many were runaways or throwaways who remained unclaimed, and no hospitals or foster centers were equipped to handle such a wave. They were like sleepwalkers, helpless, and such easy prey they needed to be separated from the rest of the detention center’s population. Lee thought of Claire, how she had just vanished. No trace. Is this what had become of her? Lee didn’t know what to believe, but for weeks as she would fall asleep she would see the Thrumm girl’s jellyfish eyes floating in the dark field of her vision.

  • • •

  Lee still thought about Edie, though not as much as before. The montage had been cut down to a few brief scenes that Lee could not get out of her head: the first time Edie’d brought her home and they’d sat drinking in her bedroom; the time after Edie had shut Lee out in favor of Claire, then let Lee back in, by the simple gesture of falling asleep against Lee’s shoulder one day at assembly; and the time she’d begged Lee not to tell the detectives about the S.A. party she’d gone to with Claire. What had happened there?

  It was nearly January; Edie would be sending off her college applications. By the time Lee got out, Edie would be finishing her freshman year.

  Lee’s mother visited three times, finally giving up after Lee refused to see her each time. She wrote letters, but Lee read only the first one. Her mom used the pronoun “I” only once and relied on “we” for the rest, explaining that she and Steve had done a lot of soul-searching and had agreed that Lee had a lot of searching to do within herself, that this was Lee’s journey to take, and that it was best for her to find her own path. They were sorry that Lee didn’t want to see them, but they understood. They knew Lee would have trouble understanding this but knew, too, that in time she would come to realize the wisdom of it and would return home a fully realized woman. Lee wet the letter into a sopping ball and threw it at the ceiling, where it stuck among the wads of toilet paper thrown by the girls who had come before her.

  Nights she lay awake, terrified. There were rumors of girls getting raped in the laundry room, girls getting cut just for being too pretty. She took a job in the library that allowed her to keep clear of most of the other inmates. It didn’t escape the notice of the three girls who had stolen Lee’s shoes that Maria, the girl who had hooked Lee up with a new pair, had taken Lee under her protection. Maria Velasquez was always talking—she was like a faucet that never turned off—and maybe that’s why she took such a shine to Lee, who rarely talked but always seemed to be listening. Nearly all of Maria’s stories involved her boyfriend, Javi, who ran with a gang and had killed people but was true to her. Maria had another year on her sentence, after which they were going to get married and start a family. She was determined that Javi was going to leave the gang life behind after that, even if he had to be beaten out. She would hook him up with her uncle, who fenced stolen goods from a pawn shop, or else her father, who ran a salvage yard, where she and Javi used to have sex in the back of old cars.

  Maria had a reputation for crazy violence—she had once tried to gouge a girl’s eye out with a spoon simply because the girl had looked at her wrong—and so the three girls who had been mounting a campaign of escalating harassment against Lee changed their strategy and began tormenting her more subtly. They blew her kisses as they passed her in the halls. They tripped her and spit on her when Maria was not around, and when she was, they winked at her with the implied promise of what was waiting. One of the girls worked in the cafeteria, and Lee often found things in her food: glass shards and insects and blobby viscous masses. They knew they could throw all their anger Lee’s way and she would never fight back.

  Maria had told Lee to come to her if anyone ever so much as looked at her funny. Lee was grateful and even touched—Maria never asked for a thing in exchange—but Lee knew better than to go to her with her problems; any problems she had were hers alone to handle. And so, after more than three months of trying to ignore them, of living in constant fear that she’d be cornered in some dark recess of the prison, of picking through her food so thoroughly that mealtime was over before she’d gotten more than a few bites in, she found a piece of what may or may not have been the tail of a rat in her spaghetti. Seeing the three of them laughing together at a table, Lee did the worst thing she could do in her situation. Something in her core that had been holding her together split, and before she realized it, Lee felt the tears on her face.

  Lee could feel all the eyes in the room now trained on her. She snuck a peek at Maria, who had a look of disgust on her face. But then Maria got up, pulled a filed toothbrush from her sock, walked calmly over to Mel, one of Lee’s harassers, and, before Mel could turn around, stabbed her in the shoulder.

  Her scream caught in her throat, Mel just twisted her neck back and tried to make sense of the toothbrush emerging from her shoulder. The other girls got up and walked quickly away, as though Mel were the epicenter of an explosion and t
he girls shrapnel. All but Maria. It was as though she wanted Mel to look her in the eyes, to know who it was who had stabbed her. When Mel’s scream finally emerged, two guards were on Maria, one pressing her hard against the concrete with his knee, the other zip-tying her hands behind her back. Lee stood there, just watching. Maria was smiling.

  Mel was pressing herself against the table, crying for someone to take the thing out of her back, but no one wanted to get near her. Finally an orderly from the hospital ward led her away, the toothbrush still sticking out of her shoulder.

  The guards had not seen Maria in the act, the video coverage was the wrong angle, and none of the girls were talking, not even Mel, but they took her in and charged her anyway. Lee knew what she had to do—both what was expected of her and what was right. What Edie had never done and never would do. When Lee asked to see the warden and confessed to stabbing Mel, it was clear he didn’t believe her. But with her confession the case against Maria fell apart and they only had Lee to pin the charges on. So they did.

  • • •

  The overhead light in her cell in solitary was always on, and Lee would see its afterimage—a hovering orange globe—when she closed her eyes. It followed her around the room when she paced, and it floated above her when she tried to sleep. She couldn’t get away from it. After twenty-eight days, she lost hope of ever being let out of her shrinking box. With nowhere to go but inward, Lee burrowed. She tunneled inside herself a little more each day, without direction or even a sense of what was up or down; there was only inward. One day she thought she heard a low vibration, like the sound of a cello being tuned, somewhere in the darkness that was herself. And so she followed the sound, digging down, or up, or in whatever direction, to try to locate it, to feel the vibration in her hands. But she never got closer; the more she burrowed, the farther the sound retreated, until she was so lost within herself that her physical body, the one that sat in the pale concrete room, stopped moving and stopped taking in food.

  They brought her to the psych ward after that, the block known as Wonderland, and Lee spent a few days in a hospital bed, taking food in through a tube in her arm. They wrapped her hands in gauze because she’d bitten her nails bloody. She stopped hearing the vibration and stopped burrowing, and soon she was walking the ward in slow, aimless circuits. She still didn’t talk, to the other inmates or to the guards, and they made little effort to talk to her. The inmates of Wonderland were different from those of Block Two. They passed each other in the hall like ghosts or sat smiling to themselves in their rooms, and a few of them were like the girl she had encountered in the cafeteria, with jellied eyes and faraway smiles directed at nothing and no one. The staff called them Thrumms, as Maria had. The guards shuffled these kids around like air hockey pucks, giving them a slight nudge that would send them wafting aimlessly in any given direction. They seemed harmless, but they gave Lee the creeps.

  It wasn’t horrible in Wonderland. Once she got to know them, the other girls were mostly okay. The food seemed uncontaminated by insects or phlegm. And there was a garden that Lee got to tend. Every day she gained a little more weight and added a bit of color to her skin. But Lee knew she wouldn’t stay here for long. When they decided she was well enough, they would send her back—either to solitary or to gen pop—and she didn’t know which she feared more.

  When she thought about the future, she found herself unable to breathe, no matter how much air she sucked in. The doctor told her she was having panic attacks, and he gave her pills to calm them. Because the attacks were the only thing keeping her out of gen pop, Lee avoided swallowing the pills, spitting them out and hiding them in a tear in her mattress, but then the attacks started to subside on their own. The staff began allowing her responsibilities, filing and tidying up the Wonderland office, and Lee knew her days there were numbered.

  Lee was alone in the office when she felt a blast of cool air prickle the back of her neck. She turned and stared up at the slats of a rectangular air vent. She took a moment, mentally measuring it against the width of her shoulders, then rifled around the office until she lit upon a strip of metal from a hanging file folder: it made a serviceable screwdriver. Lee climbed up on the desk, got the vent cover off, and just barely managed to squeeze herself into the shaft.

  Using her shoulders and hips, she pushed forward by inches. It was too tight to turn around, and the light quickly went from gray to black until she was in total darkness. Lee hadn’t thought through what would happen if she got stuck, and she began to imagine herself trapped there, what it would feel like to starve to death enclosed within this long tin box. Her breaths grew shorter and quicker until she began to labor to breathe at all. She was having another attack, and Lee knew that this time, trapped and sightless as a worm, she would die. The darkness pushed into her lungs until each breath was just a hiccup. She tried to wiggle back the way she had come, but her elbows and wrists were at the wrong angle and every movement just wedged her more firmly into the space. She managed to turn onto her side and pull herself forward a good six inches. She did it again, then again. When she saw the light ahead, her breath came back quickly. She tried to stifle her coughs, but coughing had never felt so good.

  The vent let her out into a mechanical room, full of water heaters and furnaces and a series of fuse boxes. There was a door at one end. She stood listening for a while, trying to figure out what might be on the other side, but finally just turned the knob. Through the crack she could see a hallway, with a line of closed doors to one side. She could hear voices behind the doors as she passed, ducking below the slatted windows until she came to a large metal door at the end, which she could see, through its single square window, led outside.

  · BOOK II ·

  The Passage from Virgin to Bride

  THREE

  THE door closed behind her with a hard click, leaving Lee standing on a swath of dry grass, the sun warm on her face. It was mid-August. Eight months and a few days into her seventeen-month sentence, she was out. It was that easy. To her left was a parking lot, and behind her extended the long low wall of Wonderland, which from the outside looked like nothing more than a storage facility. It was just a makeshift trailer, she saw now, not unlike the temporary classrooms her school had put up one year during renovations. The detention center, made of painted brick and more formidable, stood behind it. In front of her, across a patch of yellowing weeds and wildflowers, a wooded area fanned out along the access road she’d come in on by bus 244 days ago.

  Lee crouched when she heard voices followed by a beep. A car door slammed shut, and a gray SUV pulled out from the lot, passed through a security gate, and disappeared down the road. Across the field was a tall cyclone fence ringed with razor wire. Lee loped over to it and climbed it quickly; once at the top, she found that she could push apart the wire enough to squeeze through and drop to the other side. She had at most thirty minutes before lunchtime, when her absence would be noticed. Once she was into the woods, she started to run.

  Lee was never an athlete, but her time inside, and especially the time spent in solitary, had left her feeling boneless and wormy. Quickly out of breath, she pushed through by concentrating on the soft crunch of her shoes against the fallen leaves. The world began to blur past her in a repeating loop of trees and flickering sunlight.

  She stopped, suddenly dizzy, then put her hands on her knees, leaned forward, and coughed out a ropy mass of saliva and phlegm. The woods were dense here, and she couldn’t see more than a dozen yards in any direction. Lee thought back to the ride in from the courthouse downtown. The bus had traveled north-ish from the courthouse for a good twenty to thirty minutes before turning off the freeway onto the access road. The woods had left as little of an impression on Lee as an unbroken wall.

  She walked well past dark, walked until she was stumbling and tripping forward, and still there was nothing but woods. She could hear a river, which she was careful to keep to her left to avoid
going in circles, and the moon was full, which was her other stroke of luck—without it she would have walked headfirst into a tree hours ago. She knew she didn’t have much left in her and kept moving only because the idea of stopping, of sleeping in the middle of these woods, terrified her. So she kept going, falling into each step and keeping herself upright just enough not to fall forward.

  Until the woods stopped so suddenly that Lee nearly ran off an embankment, a steady stream of freeway traffic thirty feet below. She skidded onto her butt and caught hold of a vine. Then she pulled herself to her feet and backtracked, cutting along the freeway until she spotted a set of concrete stairs, which took her to an empty lot beneath an overpass. There were no cars down here, no people, just the steady thump of traffic from above. Still she didn’t stop. She didn’t want to sleep here any more than she did in the woods.

  But where could she go? Home would be the first place they’d look for her, and anyway, fuck her mom and fuck Steve. A teen shelter would be the second place they’d look. Her orange cotton uniform may as well have had FUGITIVE stenciled onto the back. She thought of the homeless kids she’d seen bumming change downtown and wondered where they slept. Was that who she was now?

  Lee tried to remember where she’d seen them, those raggedy spare-changing kids she used to avoid eye contact with. She knew that by late morning they’d be spread out around the department stores in the shopping district, but there was no way she could go somewhere so public. Lee kept to the shadows of buildings and to alleys when she could, keeping her eyes out for cops, her head otherwise down, arms wrapped around herself as though she could hide the orange JDC uniform. She passed a Mexican bakery, its window lined with pillowy white bread loaves, and the whole area smelled like grilled meat. Lee hadn’t eaten since breakfast the day before, and her hunger gnawed at her insides.